Paintings of cowboys explore new frontiers

View full size"Phthalo Cowboy,"2012, is one of the standout pieces in "Hello, Darlin'," Jaik Faulk's Western-themed show at Nationale.

With "Hello Darlin'," the San Francisco-based painter Jaik Faulk's second show at Nationale in as many years, Faulk offers a group of new oil paintings inspired by the Western romance with the cowboy. This distinctly American subject has no shortage of tradition preceding it, from genre paintings of ranch hands, cattle rustlers, and lonesome cowboys riding into the sunset to Richard Prince's famously re-photographed Marlboro men. Even if the myth of the American West promises new frontiers, Faulk understands that, when it comes to painting the West and its iconic heroes, there's hardly new ground to cover.

To that end, Faulk frequently submerges his subjects in a bleary, dreamlike haze, burying facial features beneath frenzied brushstrokes or embellishing his sandy palettes with flashy tones. The face of the mustachioed cowboy of "The Universe Is in His Hair" (2012, as are all works in the show) is pieced together in controlled daubs, while the upturned brim of his black hat suggests a tarnished halo. But Faulk disrupts this familiar image, painting lavender and teal locks cascading from the cowboy's forehead. It infuses the subject with a flamboyance and femininity that contrasts with the rugged masculinity we expect while conjuring vintage psychedelic rock fliers.

While "Fur Coat: Prince Colors" attempts a similar subversion of the cowboy stereotype, it doesn't quite succeed. In this painting, a bearded man is cloaked in the titular fur coat, seated in an interior dominated by gaudy purple, turquoise and gold shades. Alluding to the signature colors of the hyper-sexualized musician Prince may further Faulk's subversive cowboy commentary, but the painting unravels technically. Thin, viscous applications of paint call to mind the hasty compositions of the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, but "Fur Coat" is too densely populated to register with similar intrigue, feeling underdeveloped rather than restrained.

View full size"Country Tonk and the Carolina Kid," 2012, oil on linen stretched over panel.

The best painting in the show, "Phthalo Cowboy," presents a portrait of a cowboy, but between his shoulders and 10-gallon hat, his face has been reduced to sky-blue horizontal brushwork. While one senses detail -- a brow, a chin, a nose -- beneath the layers of obscuring paint, there's an odd way in which the portrait reads like an iconic Western landscape. The curve of the man's shoulders approximates a mountain range, the decorative concho at the center of his hat suggests a sun, and the intervening blue becomes a stretch of desert sky. More than in any other painting in "Hello Darlin'," with this one the artist demonstrates how the cowboy identity has dissolved into the backdrop of the American West, leaving a strange anonymity in its place.

For Faulk, the mythic West has become an epic ghost town, where frontier fashions endure, but the clothes no longer make the man.